Sunday, June 30, 2013

A new version of Ruby that includes a patch for the security vulnerability CVE-2013-4073 (Hostname check bypassing vulnerability in SSL client) has been recently released. We want to let BitNami users know that all our Ruby-based application installers for Linux and Mac OSX, virtual machines and cloud images have already been updated:

For more details about this security issue please check the information provided by the official Ruby blog. This issue is not as serious as other vulnerabilities that were discovered early in the year, but as a precautionary measure, it is recommended that you upgrade the applications to their latest versions. Just to be on the safe side, we will also be removing older versions of the apps from Amazon, Azure and other repositories, to prevent end users from inadvertently launching insecure versions of these apps.

Wednesday, June 26, 2013

A new major version of Rails was released yesterday. We are happy to announce we now include Rails 4.0 and Ruby 2.0 in the latest Ruby Stack. It is the perfect way to test-drive Rails 4 without affecting your current development environment. All of our development environments are self-contained and won't interfere with your existing setup.

BitNami Ruby Stack is a self-contained environment that include everything you need to develop Ruby-based applications on your desktop, using your favorite operating system: Windows, OS X or Linux. There are also virtual machines available for download and cloud images to deploy them on Azure and Amazon EC2 directly.

Friday, June 21, 2013

Yesterday the latest major version of PHP was released. We are happy to announce we now include support in our stacks for PHP 5.5.0: WAMP for Windows, MAMP for OS X and LAMP for Linux. There are also virtual machines available for download and cloud images to deploy them on Azure and Amazon EC2 directly.

The stacks allow you to setup instant PHP development and testing environments locally in your desktop/laptop or in the Cloud. They include everything you need to start working on web applications and development frameworks.

These new development stacks ship the following main components:

- PHP 5.5.0

- Apache 2.4.4

- MySQL 5.5.30

- phpMyAdmin 4.0.3

BitNami WAMP stack

This version of PHP ships the new Zend Optimizer+ extension, an opcache cachemodule designed to increase the performance. This previous post covered how to enable and configure this module.

Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Artifactory won the bi-weekly BitNami contest two weeks ago and we will add it to the the BitNami Library soon. Artifactory is a binary repository manager for Maven, Ivy and Gradle modules among others. It will be the first application in this category for which BitNami will provide one-click deployment options.

Today...

Today, we are glad to announce a new winner: Dolibarr. This application is an ERP and CRM system for small and medium companies. It will be great addition to the BitNami Library which already provides OpenERP, PhpCompta, SugarCRM and X2CRM in similar categories.

In two weeks...

Which application we should add next depends on you. Starting today, a new contest will be running for two weeks, with a new feature: every like, share or tweet will count as an additional vote. To encourage sharing, these likes and tweets will be maintained and count for the next application contest, in case the application is not a winner. Vote for your favorite application now!

Monday, June 10, 2013

We are happy to announce a new member of the BitNami family: Tiny Tiny RSS. Tiny Tiny RSS is an open source web-based news feed (RSS/Atom) reader and aggregator, designed to allow you to read news from any location, while feeling as close to a real desktop application as possible.

You did it! Now you have started your own alternative to Google Reader on the cloud thanks to BitNami and Tiny Tiny RSS. If you combine it with the AWS free tier and the free developer plan at BitNami Cloud Hosting you can have your own, private RSS reader, completely for free. Best of all, you have complete control over the server, so you do not depend on Google randomly the plug on the service.

Thursday, June 6, 2013

Amazon recently released a new AWS SDK for Node.js which provides JavaScript objects for AWS services like Amazon S3, Amazon EC2 and DynamoDB. We are glad to announce that this SDK has already been included in the BitNami Cloud Tools for AWS installers available for Windows, Linux and Mac.

You can now find this new SDK and the Node.js runtime itself together with other useful development kits like the AWS SDK for Java and the AWS SDK for Ruby in BitNami Cloud tools. These tools allow you to manage AWS services from the command line or programmatically using your preferred development language.

In this version we also include major updates of other core components, which include features such as:

- AWS Elastic Beanstalk 2.4.0 adds EC2 Role support for log publication and support for displaying Events, Tail Logs and EB Push.

- AWS SDK for Ruby 1.11.0 adds support for web identity federation to AWS Security Token Service. Since 1.8.0 (previous version included in BitNami cloud tools) it also adds support for parallel scan in Amazon DynamoDB, Elastic Load Balancing support in AWS OpsWorks and support for the AWS Support API.

- AWS SDK for Java 1.4.5 adds support for web identity federation in AWS Security Token Service (STS). Since 1.3.27 (previous version included in BitNami cloud tools) a lot of new features have also been included. Now it also supports Parallel Scan in Amazon DynamoDB, Elastic Load Balancing in AWS OpsWorks, the AWS Support API, automatic endpoint management in SQS, Amazon EC2 default virtual private clouds, Amazon Redshift, Amazon Elastic Transcode, Amazon RDS DB Instance renaming and IAM role in Amazon Elastic MapReduce.

Wednesday, June 5, 2013

We are happy to announce a new version of BitNami PHP-based development stacks that includes PHP 5.5.0.RC1. BitNami Stacks are self-contained environments that include everything you need to run your favorite web apps and development frameworks.

You can download a LAMP stack for Linux, a MAMP stack for OS X and a WAMP stack for Windows to develop PHP-based applications on your desktop, using your favorite operating system. There are also virtual machines available for download and cloud images to deploy them on Azure and Amazon EC2 directly.

These new development stacks ship the following main components:

- PHP 5.5.0.RC1
- Apache 2.4.4
- MySQL 5.5.30
- phpMyAdmin 4.0.1

One of the new modules in PHP 5.5 is Zend Optimizer+, an opcode cache module. It is a component that is designed to increase the performance of PHP without altering the behavior of applications by storing precompiled script bytecode in shared memory.

It is similar to the APC module that it is already included in all BitNami AMP/APP stacks. There are some benchmarks that report Optimizer+ is faster than APC.

To enable this module it is necessary to add the following in the php.ini configuration file:

Moodle, one of the most famous open source Course Management System, has added new interesting features for teachers, students and administrators in its version 2.5.

Moodle now allows to award badges based on a variety of chosen criteria.

Important improvements to the usability of big complex Moodle forms, now non-essential settings on forms are collapsed by default.

It includes several enrolement-related improvements.

Ability to drag and drop media and text onto the course page.

Support for all screen sizes (including phone and tablet) thanks to the Bootstrap-based themes.

Add-ons can be installed from the admin web interface.

You can experience all these new features by launching a free demo server with BitNami Cloud Launchpad.

For a full list of improvements and new features please check Moodle 2.5 releases notes.

We would like to highlight the new admin tool for installing add-ons. The process for installing Moodle plugins in previous versions required the administrator to access the machine, download the plugin, uncompress it in a specific folder depending on the plugin type, then go to the notifications panel and update the application.

However, with this new tool, login into the system is not required. The administrator user can just go to the Install add-ons options in the left menu, and select the plugin directly from the Moodle plugin directory or choose a zipped file to upload.

The plugin will be validated and then you can confirm to install it.

Please note that although this is a great feature, allowing to install add-ons from the web interface currently requires to grant write permission to the web service group on Unix systems. If you are paranoid about security and you are ok with installing the plugins manually (as you always did with Moodle before) you can disable this feature as it conflicts with the Moodle Security recomendations. Check our wiki to learn more about how to disable the install add-ons option in the BitNami servers.